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Google Places

For the possibility of showing up in a Google Places listing for a "local" search, one must create an account with Google Places, is this correct?

And is this correct, after creating and verifying a G.Places account, it seems that one day you may or may not show up in the Google Places listing for a local search?

My client will show up in Google Places for a particular search for a period of time, often number 1 and the client has 12 5 star reviews. Then for a while, no listing what's so ever in Google Places. I wonder why?

At the same time, I have seen where a Google Places listing has taken up so much of the first results page that after the Places listing you see only the top 2 rankings on the first page. Anyone have comments here?

6 Responses

Thank you for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum and hope I can answer you helpfully.

1. Yes, you need to have a Google account through which you will either create a Google Place Page (if one doesn't already exist) and then verify it either by phone or snail mail, or you will need to claim the existent listing for the business if it already exists.

2. You need to be 100% certain that the data you enter in the listing does not contain any violations of Google's Places Quality Guidelines: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10752 Accidental violations can lead to penalties.

3. As William Rock has mentioned, it's important to understand that all Local results (and all Google results in general) are personalized based on a number of factors including IP address and past user history. So, you will see different results from computer to computer across the country, as well as different results depending on if you are logged in or out of certain features.

4. In addition to the points just mentioned, there are weird updates that happen within Places that can cause temporary ranking drops and loss of reviews. These may take days or weeks to self-rectify. See this excellent recent article by Mike Blumenthal on the subject of using Google's Troubleshooter to identify problems with a listings: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/19/google-places-troubleshooting-best-practice-for-dealing-with-a-merged-listing/

You could be dealing with duplicates, a bug or just a product of Google's wonky updating. Using the troubleshooter might be the best thing for you to try first. Does this help? If not, perhaps you'd like to share the Place Page here if you are permitted to do so.

as for showing different rankings each time you have to consider Google results for logged in users as well if you are constantly checking it you are not getting a true result.. You may want to use Google Chrome Incognito or using the Google Preview Tool this is for testing Google Adwords but it will also show you real placement.

Also depending upon the keywords you are trying to rank for do you have them in the Google Places listing?

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